I look forward to catching up with the Breeze team in the next couple of weeks in Singapore.

Earlier this week, I received an email from Asif Saleem – Head of Channel Analytics and Migration who reminded me of Standard Chartered’s achievements in the online banking space too: the team have now added over a million new online banking active customers during the last 2 years to their channel. This has been possible with a series of pull and push initiatives with almost 60% of the funds transfer and payment transactions that are happening with in the bank being online.

In his email, Asif shared the initial results of one of Standard Chartered’s latest initiatives: inviting their online banking customers to rate the experience and contribute to promote SC’s Net Promoter Score

Do You Ever Invite Your Online Banking Customers to Rate Their Experience?
I’m passionate about building trusted relationships online and helping brands to communicate in a more engaging and transparent way, with a tone of voice which appeals to their customers and their market(s).

One way to measure your customer satisfaction and your online skills (such as the level of customer experience) is the almighty ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS).

Pretty much every single financial institution would like to increase their NPS, be better than their competitors, and match the best-of-breed customer experiences from other industries like FMCG or media.

The key question is: what do you do today to increase your score? How do you make sure to increase your volume of share of voice? How often do you capture customer feedback? If you do so, how and when to you capture that feedback? Do you do it in a public or strictly private way?

Standard Chartered Does. In a Public Fashion. Using Social Media.
Standard Chartered decided to become more proactive and invite their online banking customers to rate their experience straight after their session, via the logout page. It looks like this:
Looking at the statistics from the first month, it seems like the initiative has already proven successful for the bank with a very decent volume of respondents (a few thousands customers, of which less than 10% are detractors) and an overall increase of NPS of 1.5% .

There are at least two other benefits of such an approach:
* leveraging social media enables SC to spread the word on services likefacebook or twitter (which generated a couple hundreds unique visitors to the SC prospect site)
* capturing the feedback from the detractors enables SC to identify the top issues to address in priority (SMS not received and slow loading time being the top two complaints)

My Take
This is an excellent initiative which doesn’t require much technical effort or integration, and which can have an immediate impact, so you might as well adopt a similar approach.

Urging their customers to share their feedback on social media servivces like facebook or twitter demonstrate Standard Chartered’s willingness to be transparent and create conversations. It is a smart move which could drive some decent word of mouth. Of course, depending on how well your customers rate your experience, it could generate positive or negative WOM, so you need to be comfortable with that and be confident in your online banking service.

If you are not ready to adopt such an open and transparent approach, I strongly suggest you start capturing the voice of your customers now, systematically and securely, in a more confidential and less visible way. It is a step in the right direction, and you could start engaging with your customers offline. Then, whenever you are ready to ‘open Pandora’s box’, make those comments or other ratings public like Standard Chartered, American Express or USAA and fully enjoy the viral value of social media!

Have you already implemented a similar approach? What other innovative ways and mechanisms are you using to increase your NPS? I am looking forward to your input.

Based in London, Christophe is an entertaining social media keynote speaker and a trusted advisor to the global financial services industry on the topics of social media, social business and digital innovation.
Christophe has contributed to over 140 events in 18 countries.
Currently, Christophe is 'Social Media Senior Managing Consultant' at IBM Interactive Experience. He's also a Digital Advisor at the Financial Services Forum and the Moller Centre (part of the Churchill College in Cambridge).
Christophe's views on VisibleBanking.com are his own, not necessarily his employer's.

1 COMMENT

[…] This is just the latest innovation from the team. In the last few years, they launched innovations after innovations such as MoVe and the World’s Coolest Intern contests based on crowdsourcing. About a year ago, they increased their Net Promoter Score by 1.5% in just 1 month via their online banking logout page. […]